Back in 2016, I saw Warcraft in theaters. That would have been about the time I started going to the movies every week. And, well, it wasn’t very good. I remember a lot commentary about how disappointing it was considering the director was Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, and a promising up-and-coming director. Except, at that point, I hadn’t seen any of his other work, so I wasn’t exactly feeling the urge to rectify that situation.
Well, I saw his first feature Moon is currently on Netflix and opted to give his work another try, particularly a fairly acclaimed movie in its own right and see if the disappointment over Warcraft felt by many was at all warranted.
Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, the lone worker on a lunar station on the far side of the moon. He has a three year contract that, once it is over, he can go back to Earth to be with his wife (Dominique McElligott, currently on Amazon’s The Boys) and the young daughter he never met. Communication back home is spotty, so he only gets occasional previously-recorded messages from his family. His own real company is an AI-powered robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). His job is to monitor the mining machines that dig up rocks to convert to Helium-3, the main source of energy on Earth.
Sam knows his contract is almost over, and everything seems to be going well. True, he gets an odd flash of a mysterious bearded man once in a while, but other than that, everything is going well. But then a machine breaks down, Sam goes out to fix it, and he has an accident. He waked up in the infirmary, not quite sure how he got there, and then things start to get weird. Is GERTY communicating with Earth? Why can’t he go outside?
Jones paces the movie out to suggest Sam’s confusion will be a major theme, but truthfully, everything odd is mostly explained rather quickly. And given the nature of the narrative, the whole thing rests on the reliable Rockwell’s shoulders. And he’s more than up to the task. Given the movie is over a decade old, I am still reluctant to say much more about what makes his performance work so well because much of the movie’s pleasure comes with learning what’s really going on.
And I suppose I should say something about Spacey’s voice performance. GERTY is, as a character, a robot programmed only to protect and help Sam. There are a number of ways for GERTY to fulfill these functions, and they arguably aren’t always helpful, but Spacey keeps a nice flat tone reminiscent of 2001‘s HAL 9000. And given it’s Spacey, it isn’t hard to believe GERTY might be something of a potential threat. But then the actual robot will flash a smiley face and potentially change the viewer’s mind.
So, yeah, Jones really is a strong sci-fi talent. Moon is smart, establishes its rules and sticks to them, and Jones creates a unique tone for his first feature. If Moon is more indicative of what the man can do than Warcraft, then I’ll need to check out more of his work in the future.
Grade: A
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